(Download) "Speaking Volumes About Auto/Biography Studies in Canada ('Autobiography in Canada: Critical Directions', 'Tracing the Autobiographical') (Book Review)" by English Studies in Canada * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Speaking Volumes About Auto/Biography Studies in Canada ('Autobiography in Canada: Critical Directions', 'Tracing the Autobiographical') (Book Review)
- Author : English Studies in Canada
- Release Date : January 01, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 247 KB
Description
The two volumes, Autobiography in Canada: Critical Directions, edited by Julie Ralc, and Tracing the Autobiographical, edited by Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault, and Susanna Egan, demonstrate the vigour of contemporary auto/biography criticism in Canada. Published in Canada by Wilfred Laurier University Press in 2005 (Waterloo, Ontario), each book contains twelve essays by Canadian scholars, with an editorial introduction. (1) Although the only two authors to contribute to both collections are leading Canadian auto/biography scholar Susanna Egan and her respected younger colleague, the late Gabriele Helms, the citations and cross-references convey the sense of a lively and interactive scholarly community. While reading these essays on contemporary Canadian autobiography I attended a conference on "Art and Authenticity", at which a fascinating discussion followed a paper on the recently discovered "Lake Mungo footprints." (2) Traces of ancient people, men, women, and children, on the move, going about their daily life, were accidentally preserved as they crossed a muddy area about twenty thousand years ago, in the form of four-hundred-and-fifty fossilized human footprints in the remote Lake Mungo region of Australia. Yet as an art historian pointed out, the footprints are of a quite different order to ancient handprints on the walls of caves in Australia and elsewhere, where the hand was deliberately placed against the rock surface to make an imprint. The handprint constitutes an act of communication with aesthetic implications, whereas the footprints are an incidental, though extraordinary, capturing of passing people with a quite different purpose, travel for hunting, ceremony, or some other reason. The autobiographical act is more like the handprint than the fossilized footprint.